Ponte Pietra

This guide to Ponte Pietra in Verona opens with a puzzle: after retreating German troops packed four of the bridge's five arches with explosives on the night of April 24, 1945, engineers spent the next two years fishing thousands of shattered stones out of the Adige riverbed. It traces the bridge's layered past first, a span raised around the end of the first century BC for the Via Postumia road, rebuilt in brick after a della Scala order in 1298, and widened with a Venetian arch in the 1500s. Look at the color shift in the stone beneath the parapet as you cross, pale limestone giving way to rougher brick.